The Case for a “Natural-Law” Humanism

Abstract

Those who stand by natural rights need a whole new school of philosophy—a new banner—under which to make much-needed integrative advances in philosophic theory.

Those who stand by natural rights need a whole new school of philosophy—a new banner—under which to make much-needed integrative advances in philosophic theory. Libertarianism by its very nature constrains itself to a “hands-off” political theory (to be deduced from a non-aggression axiom and nothing more). A decade ago, Jeffrey Tucker spoke out “Against Libertarian Brutalism” (March 12, 2014, FEE), about two radically different impulses within the camp, a humanitarian one and a brutalist one. Naturally, the brutalists rebelled. Tucker’s instincts were correct, but his backers found no solace in libertarian theory.

In the 20^th century, Ayn Rand had sought to provide a philosophical theory (“Objectivism”) that was complete, containing a metaphysics (the nature of the world around us), meta-ethics (our human nature), an epistemology (a theory of knowledge), an ethics (how do we lead our lives), a politics that builds upon the ethics and its meta-ethical base, and a conforming theory of aesthetics. But this advanced humanism of our times, Objectivism, has been imprisoned with a lifetime sentence behind the deification of Rand (by the Ayn Rand Institute) with no hope for parole, let alone a release.

An explicit acknowledgement of its history in natural law is missing from libertarianism, Objectivism, and humanism.

An explicit acknowledgement of its history in natural law is missing from libertarianism, Objectivism, and humanism.

A new umbrella label, “natural-law humanism” could provide a new school, even a new journal perhaps, for scholars and creators to make integrative advances in interconnected fields such as ethics, psychology, law, and aesthetics. This is the theory the humanists can resort to, when finding fault with the brutalists.

Only complete philosophies can withstand the anti-scientific neo-Marxist assault we are faced with today.
 

Reason and Humanism

On May 1, 2024, Congressman and law professor Jamie Raskin, joined by another Congressman and law professor, Jared Huffman, introduced a resolution to recognize May 4, 2024, as the “National Day of Reason” to recognize “the central importance of reason,” and that “the application of reason has been the essential precondition” for humanity’s extraordinary progress in various fields.

The resolution “encourages all citizens, residents, and visitors to join in observing this day and focusing on the central importance of reason, critical thought, the scientific method, and free inquiry to resolving social problems and promoting the welfare of humankind.”

In 2017, the Washington Post said this about Huffman:

Huffman seems to be only the second member in contemporary records to describe his ethical system as not being God-based. The first was long-serving Democrat Pete Stark, also of Northern California, who made news a decade ago when he came out as an atheist.

Wow. There are many more, surely, but they dare not “come out” openly.

There are many more [atheists], surely, but they dare not “come out” openly.

However, Raskin and Huffman do identify as humanists. Since 2019, they have co-chaired the Congressional Freethought Caucus, a membership organization in the United States House of Representatives established to promote policy solutions based on reason and science, and to defend the secular character of government.

In politics, unlike closet atheists, “humanists” can now come out proudly.

What Is Humanism?

Let’s start with what they believe themselves to be (emphasis mine):

Humanism is a democratic and ethical life-stance which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethics based on human and other natural values in a spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.

—Humanists International

Humanism is, in sum, a philosophy of those in love with life. Humanists take responsibility for their own lives and relish the adventure of being part of new discoveries, seeking new knowledge, exploring new options. Instead of finding solace in prefabricated answers to the great questions of life, humanists enjoy the open-endedness of a quest and the freedom of discovery that this entails.

—The Humanist Society of Western New York

Despite the origins of skepticism of religion being traced back to Thales in Ancient Greece (“Know Thyself”) and India in the 6^th century BC by Stephen Law (see Humanism: A Very Short Introduction), we may still be dealing with a movement that still is a “philosophical stance” rather than a complete philosophy.

Humanism as a movement has been dominated by the political Left.

Humanism has been rightly associated with Aristotelian metaphysics and the Aristotelian ethics of eudaimonism. Yet humanism as a movement has been dominated by the political Left (all the members of the US Humanist Freethought Caucus are Democratic Party politicians). As a result, humanism has stayed well clear of the most humane system of all—a fully voluntary, cooperative secular system of free markets, free speech, and free minds.

In some cases, it may be the result of ignorance of how markets truly function, in some, a naïve trust in the authority of the government of the day, a trust no less naïve than the trust accorded religious leaders of the day several centuries ago: prior to, and after, the Age of Reason (the Enlightenment).

For example, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, a self-styled “humanist,” authored Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. But Pinker blithely trusts government shills (the “experts”) with regard to the absurdist claims made about human impact on climate change (see also 4:00 to 4:30 here).

Perhaps Pinker misunderstands what a scientific method is. If anyone foolishly claimed that the moon is made of cheese, the onus of proof is on the proponents. They would need to back up that claim by financing a trip to the moon, getting samples back and testing them; the rest of us do not need to sit around disproving any and every absurdist claim in order not to “buy it” until proven, or to even take it seriously until conforming evidence is presented. An equally absurdist claim of the moon-made-of-cheese kind is made when arbitrary claims are made of human activity being a dominant cause of global warming, and worse, of controlling such planet surface temperatures by controlling (by government, of course) CO₂ emissions. The onus of proof has never been remotely satisfied (see point 2 here).

It’s we the skeptics who have the moral high ground in science, and we should never hasten to unthinkingly throw it away, like Professor Pinker carelessly does.

What Else Is a Humanism?

Jean-Paul Sartre dedicated a whole lecture to arguing that Existentialism is a Humanism. Marxism, too, starts with a realist metaphysics by rejecting the supernatural. And lo and behold, there is indeed a Marxist Humanism. But Marxism does not affirm “the dignity of each human being,” or support “the maximization of individual liberty and opportunity.”

And there is a school of Christian Humanism, which regards humanist principles like universal human dignity, individual freedom, and the importance of happiness as essential or even exclusive components of the teachings of Jesus.

And there is a secular/scientific school associated with John Dewey.

What is missing is a natural-law humanism, truly celebratory of science and reason, and based on the true teleological nature of humanity.

Natural Law

In the natural law tradition, the word natural stands for something that’s derived from observation of human nature. As Aristotle noted, our distinctive feature is reason. Reason includes the capacity to understand the outside world, which obeys certain “laws.” And applying reason to the natural sciences has made possible monumental advances in these fields. But Samuel Gregg, author of The Essential Natural Law, notes that (Kindle Loc 19%) even in Plato’s time, it was recognized that reason was “practical in the sense of helping us know ethical and philosophical truth” and helping us to “choose and act rightly.” The “law” part of the phrase means that which is right, or good and just.

Gregg maintains that, although “human rights” are (Loc 35%) “usually presented as a product of a modern post-Enlightenment world and associated with figures like John Locke,” there is “a strong case to suggest that the first substantive conceptions of rights [by this he means natural rights] were developed by medieval natural law thinkers whose ideas on this subject were clarified and developed further by their modern counterparts, some of whom were reacting to expansionist tendencies on the state’s part,” [emphasis mine]. If John Locke, who inspired the US Declaration of Independence, and is regarded as the father of classical liberalism, got his ideas from natural law thinkers, then arguably the entire movement of libertarianism can trace its axiomatic concepts of negative rights to natural rights and thence to natural law.

Natural Rights

Natural rights do not occur in nature. The natural-rights school of thought does not claim that rights are inherent in nature per se, but that rights are necessitated as a normative concept by the sort of organisms we are. In Stephen Law’s book, this sentiment goes all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, centered on humans being creatures of reason. Other modern scholars trace the reasoning back to English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) but Gregg demonstrates that Locke himself uses the term “natural law.” (Some Objectivists have mistaken Locke’s argument as being religious—that God has “endowed” us with rights, but Rand’s legal heir, Leonard Peikoff, does not share that view. Libertarian philosopher Eric Mack, too, sees Locke’s argument as being essentially secular: see Chapter 2 in Libertarianism (Key Concepts in Political Theory).

Prior to John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, often portrayed as Locke’s philosophical arch enemy, painted a state of nature (Leviathan, 1651) in which human beings were always predisposed to looting, pillage, and murder, and the only way out of such an incessant threat to one’s life and liberty was to agree to a sovereign body installing law and order and establishing its sole authority over its citizens. But Locke, while also using a state-of-nature theory, disagreed with Hobbes’s characterization of the raw state of nature.

Locke maintained that humans as creatures of reason are predisposed to cooperation, humanity, shared pursuits, and the honoring of contracts. Yet, a sovereign is needed, because not all humans are predisposed to peaceful negotiation and trading, and further, that disputes can occur over contract performance both due to honest errors and personal biases.

But Locke makes an even bigger claim, which is that, as creatures of reason in pursuit of our own happiness (which he regards as natural), we have the right to be free of violence, restraint, and deceit from other human beings. Locke regards humanity as free only when such restraint is universalized, for we cannot claim something (freedom from aggression and fraud by others) for ourselves except by giving the same right to everyone else. This is in stark contrast to Hobbes, who characterized a state of freedom as a situation where everyone is free to do whatever he/she likes, including kidnapping, slavery, plunder, and pillage.

Locke asserts a “natural law,” which ought to constrain any sovereign body.

Thus, Locke asserts a “natural law,” which ought to constrain any sovereign body, since such a sovereign must only be established to enforce natural rights and no more. To, in effect, crystallize clearly natural law and fine tune it in the legal order, including for contracts between consenting adults. In effect, Locke sees a proper government being one that leaves people free to pursue their own ends, their own happiness, and only steps in to stop violence, obtain judgment and restitution by an objective impartial method, and to stop foreign invaders.

“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” (Second Treatise, 4, 6).

In the Hobbesian world, rights do not exist; whatever rights we enjoy are granted by the sovereign. Locke’s position for natural rights, however, is based on the claim that “to be free of someone else’s will being imposed on us” is rational and a consequential principle of universalization. As Eric Mack states: “Since each rationally makes this claim against others, each is rationally required to affirm every other person’s right to freedom from interference.” (Loc 401, Kindle edition, The Essential John Locke).

Locke also states the absence of evidence of a natural subordination of any person to another, or of any group of persons to another person or group. Thus, human beings do not exist for “one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses.”

Locke (John Locke, 7 Works, Kindle Edition, John Locke {author}and William Popple {translator}) thus invokes human nature to arrive at a set of moral rules that ought to govern interpersonal relationships:

“Where there is no law: but freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists: (for those who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him?) (Loc 2330, 11%)

“There being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination of subjection.” (Loc 1898, 9%)

Freedom does not mean a right to do whatever one feels like doing. Our freedom lies in others not subjecting us to their will, and the only moral way to bring this about is to agree to not subject others to our will, and get the same in return, a compact that is best administered by a sovereign instituted for that purpose.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) restated this (arguably Lockean) principle in a beautifully compact way as “each person is an end in himself.”

German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) restated this (arguably Lockean) principle in a beautifully compact way as “each person is an end in himself.” Kant also popularized the categorical imperative, which is essentially the universalization (again, arguably, a Lockean) principle. A non-subordination ethics is workable only if the ethical principles can be applied universally. E.g., to require others to not interfere with our right to free speech, we must grant others the right of free speech. (Note, we also have the right to property, so private radio station owners are well within their rights to disallow content that they either disagree with or are not interested in publicizing).

Rights theorists inevitably have to use these two principles to come up with a universalizable, rational ethics. In deriving her normative Objectivist ethics, Ayn Rand, too, used these two Kantian-Lockean principles and Locke’s other insights, albeit she did so without attribution to Kant or Locke.

Normative Principles from Facts

Yet, David Hume was right—normative concepts cannot be deduced solely from facts. We need a normative bridge connecting the field of facts with the field of norms. Proponents of natural rights do not always make this bridge explicit. The inability to deduce rights from facts alone causes an illustrious author such as Alan Dershowitz to defend rights only by large, historical wrongs in “Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights.”

In Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics (MAE), Roger Bissell and I presented an ethics for making our lives meaningful, which we regard as the end game of ethics.

In Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics: Toward a New Art and Science of Self-Actualization (MAE), Roger Bissell and I presented an ethics for making our lives meaningful, which we regard as the end game of ethics. That end game is the connecting bridge from facts to norms. As Thomas Hobbes and John Locke correctly perceived, the “raw state of nature” is filled with incredible violence including by humans. If we are to transit from such a raw state to civilization, then we need law and order. The normative bridge toward a political and legal order ought to be called “a humane society.”

If we wish to live in a humane society, we need legally-enforced natural rights—each individual must have the right to life, liberty, and property (earned in voluntary contracting without deceit). And liberty, in a humane society, must include the right of free speech with constraints no more than are accepted by the First Amendment (to the US Constitution), the right of free trade (including by entities composed of individual owners, e.g. limited-liability corporations), the right to privacy, and the right to choose (education, medicine, etc.) from those who make such resources available by unfettered agreement (including of price). A humane society must therefore uphold the right of “free contracting” among adults, and that includes the right of free contracting between corporate entities (which are formed by individuals) and between corporate entities and individuals.

As I mentioned in “The ‘Corporation’ Is Pro-Individualism and Pro-Capitalism,”

The [US] courts, Jensen and Meckling warn us, have not upheld contractual rights—even though Section 10 of Article 1 of the US Constitution says: “No state shall make any law impairing the obligation of contracts,” and the Fifth Amendment provides that “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Only natural law should become positive law. All unnatural laws and regulations should be repealed.

Human beings have a capacity for autonomy. Autonomy is a double-edged sword, but the “good” edge is way sharper than the “bad” one. Some thinkers, like psychologist Jordan Peterson (here), contend that autonomy carries naturally with it an anxiety or a “suffering.” However, autonomy wisely used in fact raises the prospect of a deeply-felt meaning and purpose, of happiness, of achievement, of love, of a teleological end of the best within us—indeed, of the lack of anxiety and reduced suffering.

The end game of politics is a humane, peaceful, and productive society which is able to defend itself against invasions and maintain its freedoms.

We know that individual autonomy in the populace gives rise to an economy functioning at its very best, which we in turn know from our 19^th century experience can foster significant uninterrupted growth with zero inflation. When all citizens are treated as equals at law, the creative forces of a true free market are fully unleashed. Opportunities to find work, to start new ventures, to discover, and to invent, will bloom. Absolute poverty will approach absolute zero. This is one of the real measures of economic success; inequality of economic outcomes is not. Private philanthropy for the truly disadvantaged will boom. What’s not to like here? Who will hate this outcome? Only those in the government circle of insiders and their cronies who currently benefit from the government’s domination of scientific research, intervention in the economy, and interference in private affairs including free speech, duties, tariffs, taxes, and subsidies. Such people will justly lose their undeserved power and prestige.

The Deficit of Libertarianism

Is libertarianism a humanism?

Many religious people identify as libertarians. But libertarianism as a political philosophy nevertheless insists on the separation of faith and the state. Faith is a private affair for libertarians that guides their moral beliefs on thorny issues such as the merits of “conversion therapy” (to dissuade teenagers suffering from a gender-identity disorder from embarking on genital mutilation) and abortion. But nonaggression is an absolute axiom for libertarianism. Which means that you can only convert people to your way of thinking through rational, argumentative persuasion, and the State must not impede a free market in goods and services, as well as in ideas.

Libertarianism does believe in free will and the power of autonomy. But the psychological foundations of libertarianism are only implicit in its political ideology, not explicit. The entire metaphysics of libertarianism is implicitly Aristotelian—as in, there is a belief that the things commonly perceived as real (such as tables, chairs, trees, snakes, walls, skyscrapers, and planes) are real, and are able to be perceived by the human mind, which, by discovering the laws of nature, can and does manipulate the environment to suit itself. Yet, many libertarians would not even know that this is an Aristotelian metaphysics (as against a Platonic view that we may be living under an illusion).

If “humanists [are those who] take responsibility for their own lives and relish the adventure of being part of new discoveries, seeking new knowledge, exploring new options,” then, libertarianism is a humanism. Indeed, it is manifestly a “natural-law humanism.”

But if we want a complete philosophy, then libertarianism, albeit compatible with it, will not suffice. The ism completely lacks a theory of aesthetics, and an explicit foundation in metaphysics and epistemology. Libertarian ethics starts and stops at non-aggression; beyond this, it provides little guidance on how to lead your own life. It tells depressed teenagers not to rob or defraud others, but not how they could lead meaningful, humane lives to get rid of their depression.

There is sometimes fiction that is termed “libertarian fiction,” but that tends to explicitly use memes that are libertarian in nature, rather than to implicitly celebrate human free will in action. (E.g., a narrative full of coincidences is not celebratory of human free will, but it could still end up being classified as “libertarian” provided there was explicit free-market or anti-authoritarian dialogue, or if a sovereign State is shown as evil.)

Many libertarians get confused by the nature of corporations.

Many libertarians do also get confused by the nature of corporations, mistakenly assuming that limited-liability corporations are creatures of the State. Limited liability is a fact of life. Everyone’s liability is limited by their assets, including the liability of corporate entities and billionaires. Contracting via a limited-liability corporation is effectively a free contracting right of individuals who choose to create such a corporation and make its stock tradeable on a market. There is no deceit when those who contract with such a corporation (as suppliers, consumers, or employees) are well aware of the nature of the entity they are trading with. Libertarians also get confused by the nature of cronyism, aka crony capitalism, which unfortunately is ubiquitous. Such left-libertarians end up hating capitalism itself and wring themselves into a state of utter contradiction by posting false dichotomies such as “Markets versus Capitalism.” Some other libertarians have swallowed the climate alarm wholesale because the scientific method is not part of their philosophical curriculum. Many others do not appreciate how central banking is automatically evil.

Libertarianism has an explicit political theory, but it’s often too deeply suspicious of all foreign policy and all state action. Even politically, there are deep divisions between the anarchist wing (the Mises Institute) and the Beltway libertarians (associated with Cato Institute and Reason dot com).

In economics, the Austrian free-market school is closely associated with libertarianism and more particularly with the Mises Institute. Austrian School economics is substantially advanced and could well be the foundational economic theory of a natural-law humanism, but for a more complete theory of the nature of the inventive human mind and its role in innovation and productivity, a marriage is needed between cognitive science, child development, educational psychology, and the economics of growth.

Relative to the problems of “Big-Tent” libertarianism, in Objectivism, the philosophy founded by Ayn Rand, we have a much tighter, well-defined philosophy. Objectivism is a humanism in the best sense of the word and takes “natural rights” (which it refers to as “man’s rights” or “individual rights”) to be axiomatic (Rand uses the term “moral law,” just as John Locke did).

So, why can’t we take Objectivism to be our philosophy going forward?

The Unanswered Critique of Objectivism

Objectivism is explicitly Aristotelian in its metaphysics, scientific in its epistemology, and has an ethic centered on the pursuit of happiness and on treating humans as “ends in themselves” and arguably also on self-perfection (see, e.g., Transcript: Reading Ayn Rand Between the Lines, Part I, and Perfecting Ayn Rand’s Egoism: Setting the Record Straight by Roger Bissell).

Objectivism also has an innovative aesthetics, based primarily (but not exclusively) on the distinctive flavor of the heroic and the celebration of human will (or lack thereof) expressed in art.

The question before us then, if Objectivism is all that, why not expand Objectivism to include what it doesn’t have—a detailed theory of law, a body of compatible psychology; an economic theory uniquely its own; a growing epistemology; a theory of child upbringing; a normative and clinical psychology (theory and practice) of leading meaningful lives, overcoming anxiety, phobias, and depression; a growing body of best practices in physical health advice; and a perfected ethics and politics and aesthetics?

After Rand’s death in 1982, her student, Leonard Peikoff, inherited her estate. Rand did not wish for an organized objectivist movement, she made no such attempt during her lifetime, and, even after receiving a terminal diagnosis, expressed no such wish. Yet, a few years later, her legal heir, Peikoff, started the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI).

Peikoff closed Rand’s philosophy to any rational inquiry or change. The result has been a philosophy stagnant since Rand’s death in 1982. The new gatekeepers at ARI seem committed to keeping it that way even though Peikoff, now 91, has left the scene.

The closing of Rand’s philosophy to improvements and additions caused a split in 1990. See, for example, chapter 5 in The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand (1990). Author David Kelley, who founded The Atlas Society, states:

But I am speaking of a potential that has not yet been realized. Kant laid out his system in enormous detail, in volume after volume. The same is true of Plato, Aristotle, and other great systematic philosophers. Ayn Rand did not develop her ideas in the form of detailed treatises. Her philosophical essays, as distinct from her fiction and her cultural and political commentary, would fit comfortably in a single volume. A philosophical system must address a wide range of specific issues—the classical problems of philosophy that arise in every branch. The great historical systems met this standard. It cannot be met in a single volume, no matter how brilliant. And of course, Objectivism is a young philosophy; it hasn’t had two hundred years, much less two thousand, for scholars to play out all the possible variations, to sift and explore the ideas, to develop their consequences. By historical standards, what we have is no more (though no less) than the foundation and outline of a system.

Nevertheless, there was a glorious period of inquiry into all aspects of Rand’s intellectual legacy. Chris Matthew Sciabarra founded the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, inviting academics and scholars to freely critique Ayn Rand even though the gatekeepers tried to obstruct its publication. The twice-a-year journal had a distinguished record of publishing scholarly papers on Rand’s corpus for over twenty years (1999–2023) until it ceased publication.

Among those was Eric Mack’s critique of the Objectivist ethics (“Problematic Arguments in Randian Ethics,” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Fall 2003), pp. 1–66, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41560235). In my opinion, it remains unanswered, although two other scholars, Frank Bubb, then a trustee of The Atlas Society, and Tibor Machan, a libertarian and self-described neo-Objectivist, defended Rand, following which Mack wrote a rejoinder.

In that critique, Mack states:

I think that Rand has offered us some very deep ethical insights, e.g., about the essential relationship between valuing and the human good and about the relationship of affirming the ultimate separate value of each individual’s good and affirming each individual’s possession of moral rights. Beyond that, Rand is simply without peer as an insightful, powerful, and heroic ethical crusader on behalf of individualism, individual freedom, and a free social and economic order. Unfortunately, I also think that line-by-line-by-line many of Rand’s ethical arguments are just awful. It is not merely that she does not bother with fine distinctions and academic niceties. Rather, her arguments all too often consist of gross misrepresentations of her opponents’ views, conflations of importantly distinct doctrines, crucial equivocations, and massive beggings of the questions at hand. And the awfulness of these arguments is compounded by the arrogance, contempt, and hostility with which they are usually expressed.

And, further, that:

As long as those who appreciate Ranďs deep insights and who want to sustain and expand her ethical crusade do not break free of these really bad arguments and their characteristic tone, they will fail in their own attempts to make Ranďs insights and crusade attractive to a wider, intellectually discriminating, audience. This discussion is motivated by a desire to save Ranďs deep ethical insights and the credibility of her crusade from Ranďs own line-by-line argumentation.

The principal criticism of Rand, with which this author agrees, is related to:

1. “Frequent misdescription of the targets of her criticism and her conflation of distinct philosophical stances under a single label,”
2. And that “Randian argumentation persistently shuffles back and forward between the conceptual and the causal understandings and defenses. It is especially common to shuffle from the causal understanding and defense of a claim of the specified form to the conceptual understanding and defense when the inadequacy of the causal defense is becoming too obvious.”

What is a causal defense? If we argue that A negates the possibility of B, and we want B, we must avoid A. But the claim that A negates the possibility of B must be open to empirical examination. Alternately, we can postulate that A is a necessary condition of achieving B. If B for instance is a state of worldly success (prestige, money, fame, and status), and A is postulated to be “always being rigorously rational and true to one’s beliefs,” and if our strict rationality led us to believe that the extensive government interference in the free market is both immoral and counterproductive, we should not pretend to go along with the status quo for political purposes, otherwise our theory tells us that we will not gain worldly success. Clearly, this is manifestly false. We find far too many examples of worldly success being enjoyed by people who either believe falsehoods by unfocussing their minds away from reason or advocate them knowingly for the sake of worldly success. And, indeed, in a society that increasingly rewards such thinking and behavior, those who buck the trend by sticking their necks out proclaiming the truth increasingly tend to suffer a loss of prestige, livelihood, and status.

A conceptual defense is a claim that can also be subject to empirical examination but it’s of a different nature. Suppose one desires a eudaimonic state of mind, and postulates that one cannot attain that state without an uncompromising integrity. That seems reasonable enough, but is it true? Now if we define a eudaimonic mental state to include uncompromised integrity, the conceptual claim holds true by begging the question.

Another factor to consider is the effect of the loss of several other values to the individual as a result of uncompromised integrity—Galileo is celebrated today, but he spent the rest of his life under house arrest once he declared that he stood by the Copernican revolution. Now, if we theorize that certain other values such as family, camaraderie, respect, and objective recognition of one’s work are all also crucial to a eudaimonic state of mind, we are in a no-win situation if society threatens us with long-term arrest or even cancellation; our knowledge of truth becomes a barrier to achieving a good mental state, no matter which way we turn.

Mack’s charge, that Rand shuffles back and forth between causal and conceptual claims of the same position, is entirely valid. When Rand finds the causal defense to be clearly unworkable, she shuffles to a conceptual defense, which, too, in my opinion, is asserted, neither defended nor empirically tested.

In Mack’s opinion, Rand creates problems for herself by using life as the ultimate value, and the problems are avoidable if Rand had instead used “wellbeing” for instance as the ultimate value. Those who refuse to countenance any error made by Rand argue that wellbeing is not objective. It’s true that it is not as rigorously objective a measure as being dead or alive. However, in Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics, Roger Bissell and I define a mental state of flourishing. Further, instead of using flourishing as the end game of ethics, we use “making our lives both subjectively (to us) and objectively meaningful” as the ultimate value and we elucidate how this can be done.

Rand claims to have solved Hume’s Paradox. We don’t make such a claim, because the paradox is essentially unsolvable.

Rand claims to have solved Hume’s Paradox. We don’t make such a claim, because the paradox is essentially unsolvable. Granted, all good ethics tries to relate normative statements to “facts as postulated.” That includes Rand, and hundreds of other ethicists, including us. One problem, though, is that even when clearly engaging with facts, one needs a normative bridge from the field of facts to the field of values. One has to have something that one most wants to do or achieve that serves as one’s end game, the North Star for one’s life efforts. Our bridge is the deep aspiration to make our lives meaningful, and we admit that such an ethics may be of little value to those who do not wish to do so.

Rand pretends to have discovered the one and only true ethics. She repeats John Locke’s observation that humans survive by way of reason. Her one-time close friend and mentor, Isabel Paterson, made a similar observation in The God of the Machine (Kindle Loc 1753):

Right as a concept is necessarily opposed to force, otherwise the word is meaningless. Liberty is a truly natural condition; for life itself is possible to a human being only by virtue of his capacity for independent action. If any living creature is subjected to absolute restraint, it dies. Human life is of an order transcending the deterministic necessity of physics; man exists by rational volition, free will. Hence the rational and natural terms of human association are those of voluntary agreement, not command.

Therefore the proper organization of society must be that of free individuals. And their equality is posited on the plain fact that the qualities and attributes of a human being are ultimately not subject to measure at all; a man equals a spiritual entity.

And, further, that:

But in reason, if one man has no right to command all men—the expedient of despotism—neither has he any right to command even one other man; nor yet have ten men, or a million, the right to command even one other man, for ten times nothing is nothing, and a million times nothing is nothing.

Using the principles outlined by Locke and Paterson, Rand tried to mount an ethological argument. The human species has a distinctive mode of survival, which is by using reason, so we must use reason and only reason at all times, which, she asserts, is the way to happiness. A series of virtues are asserted as being necessary adjuncts to being rational. But to avoid the empirical trap of people without such virtues obviously surviving, even securing as much longevity (if not more) as normal people, Rand, and Randians, in Mack’s opinion, shuffle to a conceptual defense that such a survival is not amenable to one’s self-esteem, which is needed for survival. The conceptual defense is that survival as man qua man is survival as defined by Rand, not real and bare survival. But is even the conceptual defense defendable? No empirics are offered. One way out is to call some humans as “subhuman” which Rand uses in her corpus from time to time as a getaway from the empirics that challenge her vision.

In addition, Rand also switches from the species to individual prescriptions of relying solely on reason by making use of a Kantian categorical imperative, a Kantian universalizability that she needs to avoid parasitism being empirically successful. She does so without acknowledging Kant as its author, whom she elsewhere blasts as an enemy of reason. But parasites and integrity-compromisers exist and do quite well. Her one-time protégé, Alan Greenspan, became Objectivism’s biggest traitor by not only accepting the evil of central banking but by becoming its longest-serving Chairman of all time by signing on to Bill Clinton’s revival of the Carter-era “easy home loans for minorities” practice, and very nearly ruined the world’s economy in a global financial crisis (see: So Who Really Caused the Global Financial Crisis?), while never espousing real capitalism when in the Fed chair. Apart from power, prestige, fame, and fortune, Greenspan got longevity as well. He’s now a merry 98, alive and kicking as of the time of this writing. Mack also observes that dictators have lived a normal length. Rand would rather that they die early or suffer (“nature will take its course”), but Al Gore made millions while subjecting Americans and then the whole world to climate fraud, while Barack Obama smiles from ear to ear wearing his $400K-an-event talking fee like a Purple Cross (America’s highest military honor). Meanwhile, Australian Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, languished in isolation or jail for 14 years for exposing US military secrets—his release and return to Australia only enabled by an admission of guilt, while Edward Snowden is condemned to live and die in Russia by exposing the NSA surveillance evil.

Rand herself has We the Living protagonist Kira Argounova die an early death, and the once-honest Leo disintegrate, both in the face of society-wide evil. Can a “virtue ethics” work in a totalitarian society? It depends on just how inhumane is that society. As of now, several civilizations are also facing diminishing birth rates, resulting in a strain on the age-pyramid. Is genetic generativity a joy that will be refilled by a truly humane society, or are we condemned to an aging and perhaps dying pyramid, when there is no longer “a duty” to have children in a severely individualistic ethic? We must be prepared to answer this pressing question empirically.

Objectivism has been imprisoned with a lifetime sentence behind the deification of Rand (by the Ayn Rand Institute) with no hope for parole, let alone a release.

Indeed, we must also be prepared to critically examine our tenets of a humanism based on natural law.

For more on a natural-law ethics derived from empirical psychology combined with philosophic theory, see Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics: Toward a New Art and Science of Self-Actualization.

The Case for a Natural-Law Humanism

There are a great many questions to which Objectivism has not provided a substantive blueprint, and neither has classical liberalism or libertarianism.

Just as a sampling, consider:

1. Taxation to fund a minimal state
2. Education: pedagogy, curriculum versus customization; the integration of a Montessori-style approach into a broader theory
3. Foreign policy and sovereignty of a nation
4. The limits on the rights of a government to classify information as secret, to make its disclosure an act of treason punishable, let alone by death
5. The drafting of a perfect natural-rights Constitution for a republic and ensuring its long-term survival
6. Redemption (we tackle this briefly in MAE) from moral transgressions
7. An extensive jurisprudence that constrains regulatory and legal power to enforcement of natural rights
8. A theory of child rearing and the functioning of families
9. The dual global problems of the aging population pyramid, courtesy higher life expectancies, and lowering birthrates
10. The problem of sovereign borders and immigration for ethics and laws that ought to apply to the whole of humanity
11. The validity (or otherwise) of intellectual property law
12. A theoretical edifice and a practical solution for the “consent of the governed”—a state has no explicit consent from those who are born into it (for one theoretical edifice, see “Natural Obligation Explanation,” in The Essential John Locke, by Eric Mack)

What is the philosophical banner under which these (and many other) problems can be tackled? Under what banner can we advance epistemology, aesthetics, and political theory? It must be a “humanism,” in so far as a humanism is defined in any way compatible with the various secular descriptions that currently define it.

But since we are wedded to “natural law” and much (though not all) of Lockean political theory, we must call it a “natural-law humanism” to distinguish it from all the current (and defective) humanisms that are out there.

There’s a large body of theory that sits under the “natural law” banner. That would be a good place to start.

 
 
The author thanks Roger Bissell and Donna Paris for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Related Posts:

1. Who Will Shift the Overton Windows?
2. Transcript: The Culture of Liberty and the Power of Fiction
3. The Culture of Liberty and the Power of Fiction

   

About the Author: Vinay Kolhatkar

Vinay Kolhatkar is a freelance journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and finance professional. He is the Chief Editor of The Savvy Street. Vinay has authored a TV pilot screenplay Undercover: The Story of Jamila, and two literary thrillers A Sharia London and The Frankenstein Candidate.. He is also the co-author of Media Wars: The Battle to Shape Our Minds. More about Vinay is at the Founder page.